Hey VIPs —
I’ve had this Newsweek article open in a browser tab since October, but there never seemed to be a good time to use it. But two things have happened recently: First, a historian has taken apart an episode of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project,” which is now a “documentary” series on Hulu. Second, as we showed you earlier, Disney’s “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder” recently featured an episode that went all-in on both the “1619 Project” and critical race theory and argued that descendants of slaves had earned reparations. If you missed it earlier, here it is again:
Imagine paying money to Disney to teach your kids to hate themselves and hate their country pic.twitter.com/cZBBCwVd7l
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 5, 2023
What caught our eye here is when our little troupe got to black inventors and showed a portrait of George Washington Carver. How is that important? Well, Hannah-Jones got bent out of shape when someone questioned her historical knowledge of Carver.
This essay responding to the egregious Nikole Hannah-Jones by the always excellent David Azerrad has two great advantages over anything written or said by Hannah-Jones: 1) it is extremely funny 2) it is 100% accurate. https://t.co/KGHxfC3LAA
— Roger Kimball (@rogerkimball) October 3, 2022
It’s Black History Month, so why shouldn’t we be learning about one of the most renowned black scientists of his time? Hillsdale assistant professor David Azerred explains in Newsweek of all places:
Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose newfound fame is due to America’s seemingly endless appetite for racial flagellation, recently caught wind of an excerpt from my speech in which I criticized the excessive praise showered on mediocre black composers, scientists, and writers from the past. “If he were not black, no one in America today would know who George Washington Carver is,” I said.
In response, the mother of the infamous “1619 Project” tweeted: “It is truly a heady cocktail of hubris, ignorance and mediocrity to claim that a Black men [sic] born into slavery who became one of the most renowned scientists of his time wouldn’t be celebrated if he weren’t Black and actually had to work for his acclaim like white men did.”
That is quite the claim. Carver’s “time” spanned from 1896, when he was hired by Booker T. Washington to teach at the Tuskegee Institute, until his death in 1943. His career thus overlapped with those of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Rutherford, Marie Curie, and Ivan Pavlov, to name but some of the most prominent Nobel laureates from that era.
Carver’s claim to scientific fame, by contrast, lies in … well, that is actually hard to say. He obviously did not win a Nobel Prize. In fact, he never won any scientific prizes. Nor did he ever publish articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. His most famous publication was a bulletin entitled “How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption,” in which he gratefully acknowledges drawing from Good Housekeeping, The Montgomery Advertiser, Wallace’s Farmer and a number of other magazines, newspapers, and cookbooks.
“One of the most renowned scientists of his time,” says not-a-historian Hannah-Jones. Right up there with Albert Einstein.
So even “The Proud Family” props up Carver as one of history’s greatest inventors.
It is important to say, as the article does, that Carver was a good guy and a smart man – but just like 99.99999% of the rest of us , he wasn’t and never claimed to be a scientific super genius.
— TruthNado – Cross tab Truther (@truth_nado) October 3, 2022
But Hannah-Jones describes the “1619 Project” with just one word: Truth.
Related:
This is fine: Disney show helmed by gal w/ ‘not-at-all-secret gay agenda’ pushes CRT lunacy on kids https://t.co/N5ifUuHQmN
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) February 6, 2023
